A Woman in Berlin

• Director: Max Färberböck
• Writer: Max Färberböck, Catharina Schuchmann
• Cast: Nina Hoss, Evgeny Sidikhin
• Theatrical Release Date: July 17, 2009 3:36 AM
• Distributor: Strand Releasing
• Criticwire: B
• On The Web IMDB Entry

Synopsis: April 1945 - German women are victims of rape - one of them is the beautiful Anonyma (Ms. Hoss), who, in her desperation and will to survive, decides to look for an officer who can protect her. She meets Russian officer Andrej (Evgeny Sidikhin) with whom she develops a complex and symbiotic relationship that forces them to remain enemies until the bitter end. Anonyma is one of the few surviving women to ever have reported on a subject that is still taboo, and which still occurs in wars around the world. [Synopsis courtesy of Strand Releasing]

Round-up: Ella Taylor of the Village Voice calls this "[o]ne of the best of a new breed of indigenous movies prying open the Pandora's box of German suffering in World War II.... " In Time Out New York, Nicolas Rapold observes, "Färberböck is obviously invested in the story’s strange tangles of the heart, which tap into a far-reaching sense of shame (the original memoir was only recently republished, owing to lasting taboos about the era’s mass rapes). But this shapeless adaptation falls short of achieving the full impact of a complicated, undertold chapter in history." Slant's Ryan Stewart places the film within a genre, "Unlike the forceful, unwavering Downfall, which dared to view Berlin's final collapse into an inferno of medievalist savagery exclusively through guilty German eyes, this is a film with diplomacy and even-handedness constantly on the brain as it divides and dilutes its viewpoint among a host of historically identifiable constituencies: Regretful and dead-ender Germans, restrained and plunderous Russians, and cultural outsiders like a Mongolian-Soviet infantryman and a Silesian refugee on the German side are all foregrounded just long enough to have their stories presented in the tidy dimensions of a made-for-television film. "